


Inhale, Exhale

by Lsusanna



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst, Captain Swan - Freeform, Dark, Dark Hook, Dark Ones, Dark Swan, Dark Swan Arc, Excalibur, F/M, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, Genderswap, Implied Sexual Content, One Shot, Rule 63, cs, dark one - Freeform, fem!Killian, post-Camelot, pre-underworld, rule 63 cs is the best cs, the author has long since stopped giving a shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 22:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5309153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lsusanna/pseuds/Lsusanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finds her sitting at a booth in Granny's, and--well. </p><p>If you didn't know what to look for, you almost couldn't tell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inhale, Exhale

**Author's Note:**

> I AM AWARE that I rule 63 more often than I don't. This arc has fucked me up enough that I don't care anymore. 
> 
> This was proofread by me when I was tired, so I apologize for any mistakes I missed.
> 
> Also--I will continue to deny the absence of Killian's greatcoat till I die. I'm pulling a Marvel-style Coulson Lives. Ta-da. 
> 
> Enjoy!

She’s sitting in Granny’s, on the table in front of her an untouched muffin on a plate, and a mug of coffee that’s probably more rum than coffee, likely only ordered in the first place not for the pretense, but for the caffeine. (Or, rather, the semblance of caffeine. Dark ones don’t sleep; dark ones don’t get tired.)

 

He slides into the booth across from her. She takes no notice of him, except that her draft of coffee might become more measured in its second half; in the way she swallows, the way she sets the mug back on the epoxied wood.

 

He takes notice of her. The greatcoat has made a reappearance, but not the vest, under the coat a black shirt. The chain around her neck is the same, as are the rings on the fingers that still arc loosely over her coffee mug. But they’re black, Stygian; like they’ve sucked up the tar in her by osmosis. He supposes that in the land without magic, this is the manifestation of the darkness, the replacement of the shadows that had inked the skin under her eyebrows in Camelot, the navy rims around her irises. Her eyeliner is thicker, like it was in a tavern thirty years ago; she’s wearing lipstick, too, the shade more red than Regina’s but also much blacker, and—well.

 

If you didn’t know what to look for, you almost couldn’t tell.

 

(She killed Arthur, night before last.)

 

Killian runs her index finger around the rim of her mug, like it’s crystal glassware and she’s trying to make it sing, before finally lifting her fingers from the cup. She leans back against the booth, tossing her head to one side to flick away stray clumps of hair from her face, there because she’s thrown it all to one side, with no discernable part. Her hair is different too; instead of thick, glossy waves, it undulates in small, thin strands, messy and wild. Blacker, if that’s possible. More of a void. He returns her eye contact.

 

“Fancy seeing you here,” she says. And it’s true. This is the first time Eric’s been in the diner since the return from Camelot. He’s taken precautions, though; isn’t wearing the leather, just a jacket, and a shirt. Black, all, but normal, and there are no familiar faces in the diner this shade of early, and so since no one knows him by sight, no one notices him. (Granny is the exception, but Granny, bless her, just couldn’t give a fuck.) He supposes the same holds true for Killian.

 

(She killed Arthur, night before last. Mary Margret, David, and Regina had come bursting into the house once the ink wore off and he released them from their spell, after Killian and Zelina had gone and left him tied up on the couch. They thought it was Eric, who had left the king on the asphalt in a pool of blood, a hole in his chest and his heart on the pavement next to him.)

 

(She dueled Gold on her ship yesterday, and Eric still isn’t sure of she was hoping to die, and he still isn’t sure how the man left alive.)

 

“I figured I’d find you here,” he answers.

 

“Hmm. Come for the sword?”

 

“No.”

 

“Yeah? What did you need to see me for, then?” Her tone is light. Conversational. Unbiased.

 

“I wanted to talk to you.”

 

“About what?”

 

“A lot of things.”

 

“Like?” she says, and Eric supposes he never really appreciated how tedious communicating with a person with a knack for semantics and a passion for infuriating people could be, when said person no longer cared to know what he meant, to indulge his poor communication skills by taking the lead with her near-superhuman ones. He supposes he never really appreciated _her_ , which is--not the point.

 

“I just…think we need to talk.”

 

“Okay,” Killian agrees, turning her plate around so that the muffin faces her at a different angle. She puts her body into exaggerating the motion, but she still doesn’t touch the muffin. She straightens, gesticulating mildly in a ‘now what’ manner as she shoots him a grin. “So. Talk.”

 

“Well, for starters, where’s Zelina?”

 

“What do you care? You were going to kill her anyway; I doubt her wellbeing is a priority of yours. Unless you still have hopes of filling her with darkness like a water balloon to be popped.”

 

“I don’t,” Eric replies. “And you know what I meant.”

 

“Do I?"

 

“Killian.”

 

“Why are we only blunt when it strikes your fancy?” she muses.

 

“Please.”

 

Something strikes Killian’s eyes like a chip of light, something that could be soft, in origin, but ends up looking sharp. Angry. “I assume with her daughter. I suppose she’ll start scheming soon, but it’ll be a concern of Regina’s, not yours. She doesn’t have an interest in our little struggle between good and evil.” She picks up her mug, and leans back on the booth again. “I think I finally earned that woman’s respect,” she sighs.

 

“Arthur?”

 

“Hmm,” she agrees around a mouthful of coffee, nodding. She sets the mug back down. “You know, I understand why everyone always takes hearts. I see the appeal, of killing someone by, essentially, crushing their soul between your fingers—it’s very symbolic. But for all that, the methodology is…incredibly clean.” She looks at her hand as she says it; runs her thumb over her fingerpads.

 

“And what now?”

 

“I think,” Killian says, still lounging back in confident, controlled grace, “that your plan of destroying the darkness by doing something heinously dark was doomed to fail. I think that you’re as incapable of destroying the darkness as you ever were, if it means my dying. I think if I kill myself first, you’ll lose yourself to the darkness interminably—you’ll probably blame your team of heroes; I suppose then they’ll find out what a dark swan really looks like.

 

“I do think that I could take the darkness out of you myself. Then I could run myself through. Or you might, if the stakes were raised high enough. I might even be able to make you do it.” She tells him she could manipulate him that far like she’s telling him the sky is blue. Then something familiar shows through; some old, latent fear, knowledge of how far she can go. “But then all the darkness would be in me. That’s quite the gamble. I don’t know if I would want to die, then. And I don’t know if I trust you to kill me. No matter what I say. I might not let you. Now, I suppose you could go back into the light, and leave me alive, but it’s still all or nothing; to take the darkness out of you, you’d have to put it somewhere, and unless you want to find another Zelina, there’s the same problem of me taking it all.”

 

“Which is a moot point,” Eric cuts in. “I’m the one who brought you into the darkness; I’m not going to leave you alone in it.”

 

“Well. I thank thee for thy benevolence,” Killian says, something foreboding entering her tone along with a mean little ‘duh’—or, rather, ‘of bloody course you’re not’.

 

“So,” Eric says, after half a moment. “You’re saying we’re at an impasse.”

 

“No,” Killian corrects, cold and hard, but still too neutral to be cruel. “That would imply level scales. We might have been, in Camelot—you with your dagger, me with the sword. But not now. Now, we’re in a calm.”

 

Eric knows she’s talking about her possession of Excalibur, and implying the time in Camelot where he wouldn’t give her the half that belonged to her, after she came out of the vault. To be fair, he only did it because he was afraid of what she would do with it. Which probably made the situation worse. And it was a moot point; she killed Merlin with nothing but her hands, even with only having the one.  “Killian, I only did any of this to save—”

 

“Don’t,” Killian growls, sitting straighter, and then—then the dark one surfaces in full, the cutthroat pirate captain. The one he’d created, and the one he can’t fix. There’s no point denying it any longer. He’s sitting across from the woman he’d lost in trying not to lose, because he _couldn’t_ —

 

“I’m sorry,” Eric says. “I’m sorry. It was a selfish decision. All right? And it was wrong. And stupid, and I’m _sorry_ , I just, I didn’t want—I just…couldn’t lose you.”

 

Killian gets that same look in her eyes, that steely softness. “Better,” she says.

 

Eric isn’t sure what to respond to that with, so he doesn’t. “So, then? What are you going to do now?”

 

“Well, you tell me. Where’s your…backup?”

 

“What?”

 

“Your parents. Her Majesty. Whoever else has been enlisted to keep me from whatever scheme you think I’m planning.”

 

“No, I… Killian, I really did just come here to talk to you,” Eric says.

 

He does not sound hurt, and he isn’t, but it gets a rise out of her anyway. “Did you indeed?” she asks. There isn’t relief or forgiveness in her voice, and she isn’t cruelly toying with his attempt. She’s somewhere in between. “Where are they then?”

 

“At the house,” Eric replies, and Killian nods. “I left them there,” he adds, and she watches him.

 

(After Gold left her ship, their mercy waned. Eric didn’t bother convincing them, this time, merely left. After Camelot, he’s biased. After Camelot, he doesn’t blame himself.)

 

“Why are you here?” she asks.

 

“For forgiveness,” he answers.

 

“Oh, Swan,” she says, and he gets the impression of the old Killian as she leans over the table and takes his hand, _his_ Killian, loving voice and an open expression on her face, just inches from his, soft eyes looking into his own. “I’m nowhere near forgiving you.”

 

Eric blinks, and it takes him just a second to find his bearings, momentarily confused about which of her he’s speaking to. “Come with me anyway?”

 

“Come where?” she asks, and he takes another moment in answering, gaze flicking over her face, torn between watching her lips as she speaks and her eyes as she looks at him. She’s still leaning over the table, she’s still so close. He can smell the ocean, and the rum, and the coffee.

 

“You’ll like it, I promise.”

 

(The thing is, he thinks all the things she does. They’re stuck.)

 

(The thing is, he knows they aren’t.)

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

He watches her, as the bug rolls down the road. There’s little enough to demand his attention, on this highway framed by pines.

 

(It’s his curse, his car; he can leave the town when he likes, and take whomever he likes with him.)

 

This is one of the few times Eric has ever seen Killian not feel the need to fill a silence, a silence that isn’t uncomfortable, but isn’t _them_ , either. She looks out the window, mostly; runs a finger around the door handle. The only time she looks at him is when they pull up to the diner he was found near, when he was a baby. She doesn’t know the significance, but she can sense there is one, and she no longer waits for him to share, taking his hand and appreciating being let in, the trust they’re slowly building. He doesn’t watch back as they walk to the entrance, instead keeps his eyes on the door, but he can feel her examining him, can feel the dark edge in her gaze and the almost-smirk on her stained lips, and can’t decide whether or not she would exploit the knowledge, if she had it.

 

Eric doesn’t know whether or not his bringing her here was him offering a boon, but Killian accepts it, nonetheless, he thinks; he orders them a pie and she joins him in eating it. She also sporadically turns her spoon upside down in her mouth and takes longer than she needs to pull it out, and he knows that she knows he still watches her lips, occasionally.

 

It’s a cherry pie, whole; probably sweeter and more gelatinous than it needs to be. It’s probably why it takes them so long to make their way through it, but they do, occupying the booth for hours, shoulders locked and elbows resting on the table. Their booth is in the back, against the wall, by the kitchen; Eric takes the side that keeps him with his back to that wall and facing the door, because Killian chose the other, not that he minds. Whenever the bell over the door jingles as someone comes in, or a chair scrapes against the linoleum as someone gets up to leave, her gaze shifts, and from Eric’s angle it looks as if her eyes are closed. All he can see of them are the lines of pearlescent obsidian taking up almost half of her eyelids, long camel lashes spread above her cheekbones.

 

“You really should kill me, you know,” Killian says, conversationally, when the sun has already set and the world has started to darken in its absence, and the diner’s employees have long since stopped bothering to glare at them for setting up camp at the booth all day, ordering nothing but that pie. The waitress that’s been serving them and trying not to stare at the hook is within earshot as she says it, but Killian doesn’t seem to care.

 

“I don’t think making sex eyes at that poor woman is a good way to convince her not to call the cops, you know,” Eric replies.

 

“Why are we only ever blunt when it strikes your fancy?” Killian muses, again, idly turning her spoon between her fingers, digging into a patch of piecrust she had rendered devoid of filling.

 

“I don’t think it gets much more blunt than ‘murder me’.”

 

Killian says nothing, instead focusing on excavating a perfect circle of crust, exposing the aluminum pan underneath. She doesn’t eat it; looks up at him, expression pointed but otherwise blank.

 

“I thought you had, uh, ‘lost all inclination to die for me’,” Eric replies, quoting one of the things she said in Camelot. (Her darkness is not the only one that is selfish; not the only one that is embittered and bent on blame, and taking everything gracelessly and to heart.)

 

She smiles. “Possibly,” she says.

 

(Eric knows he’s come full circle, because instead of hearing the ‘I have’ and losing trust in her for it, he hears the ‘not necessarily’ and doesn’t trust that he knows _why_ she’s saying it.)

 

(It’s the first time they’ve spoken since that morning at Granny’s.)

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

There is a motel on the road, separated from the diner by another stretch of highway, which is definitely a motel, not an inn, but still tries to be charming in a cabin-in-the-woods kind of way. They take a room in an out-of-the-way corner, the bug’s parking space a patch of shadow because the streetlight is out there.

 

He enters first and she follows him in, shuts the door with her foot. A part of him wonders if it’s symbolic in a bad way, that their first time is when they’re both like _this_ , but they _are_ both like this. A part of him has always wondered what they would be like; when he first met her, he hypothetically and privately thought it would be the one-night stand to end all one-night stands. When he got to know her better, he thought much the same; fun, if more a lasting event in their lives. When they got serious, his approximations turned softer, to a thing that would mean something more, like they hadn’t since Nan, sometimes, towards the end (always, with her, the inevitable end). He’s wondered after them on thick comforters, by warm fires, amid the sway and creak of the Jolly Roger.

 

And so, it is surprisingly unmemorable, unceremonious. They leave the lights off and the room stays dark, except for the heavy yellow light of the streetlamps outside the window, coming in through closed blinds and open curtains, but that still doesn’t extend into the room more than a yard. They both go by feel and a sixth sense, but neither of them once misjudges a distance. They hardly pass the night this way, only some hours, at most, before lying back on top of bedclothes neither of them bothered to turn down.

 

(One thing Eric will say, is that lying there in the darkness, he comes close to leaving a state of alertness, thoughts hazing and eyes dropping half-closed, so that an unknown amount of time passes with his mind at a near standstill. It’s as close as he’s gotten to sleep in weeks, and he isn’t oblivious enough to not realize that that probably has something to do with Killian.)

 

(Another thing worth mentioning is that she doesn’t leave once throughout the long hours of the winter night, doesn’t so much as roll over to her side of the bed.)

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

“You have to kill me, you know,” Kilian says, the next morning.

 

“Well, good morning.”

 

“You _do_.”

 

Eric sighs through his nose—coincidentally, into her shoulder. “Killian—”

 

“No,” she interrupts, by what she’d heard in his tone, half-twisting out of her position as acting little spoon, so that all she’d have to do to face him directly is turn her neck a bit. “I’m not being noble. I’m not…” She huffs out an exhalation. “Do you kno—no, you don’t know, you couldn’t, you—the human mind isn’t…physically capable of fathoming more than a single lifetime. You can know, but you can’t… _know_ , you can’t…comprehend how _long_ three hundred years are. Hell, I can’t—I was there, and I barely remember any of it—we’re not meant to be alive that long. I’ll not do it again. I couldn’t. Definitely not like this. So, you have to banish the darkness. And you have to let me die.”

 

“Yeah, I know,” Eric agrees quietly.

 

“…Okay,” Killian says. She turns, and lies back down.

 

The quiet teeters on the verge of becoming tense and this time to being over, but Killian moves her head, and her mouth finds the hand of the arm Eric has around her waist. She doesn’t kiss him, but the second knuckle of his thumb settles in the grove between her lips, and stays there. She takes a deep breath through her nose, the gust of air running over his fingers.  

 

Eric lets his head rest back against his pillow, nearly overrun by inky locks of hair. Inhales, and exhales.

 

(It’s the first time they’ve spoken since those few words in the diner.)

 

(Excalibur sits on the bureau in front of the television, wrapped in a blanket.)

 

 

 

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> I'm seeing this as sandwiched between canon plot somewhere, in a kind of missing-scene-y way. Also, I think that Emma banishing the darkness and Killian dying is the only way this can end, complications and winding-road-to-get-there aside, which would take us to the underworld in 5b. (And Killian killing Arthur is a thing that I neeeeed.) 
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Concrit is welcome.


End file.
